'Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead; And the Christ shall shine upon thee.'"
The contrast between the Christian and heathen way of life is now, finally, to be set forth under St Paul's familiar figure of _the light and the darkness_. He bids his Gentile readers not to be "joint-partakers with them"--with the sons of disobedience upon whom God's wrath is coming (ver. 6)--for he has hailed them already, in chapter iii. 6, as "joint-partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel." "Once" indeed they shared in the lot of the disobedient; but for them the darkness has past, and the true light now shineth.
In wrath or promise, in hope of life eternal or in the fearful looking for of judgement they, and we, must partake. This future participation depends upon present character. "Do not," the apostle entreats, "cast in your lot again with the unclean and covetous. Their ways you have renounced, and their doom you have exchanged for the heritage of the saints. Let no vain words deceive you into supposing that you may keep your new inheritance, and yet return to your old sins. Show yourselves worthy of your calling. Walk as children of the light, and you will possess the eternal kingdom." Each man carries with him into the next state of being the entail of his past life. That heritage depends on his own choice; yet not upon his individual will working by itself, but on the grace and will of God working with him, as that grace is accepted or rejected. He has light: he must walk in it; and he will reach the realm of light. Thus the apostle, in verses 7 and 8, concludes his warning against relapse into heathen sin.
Verses 9 and 10 delineate _the character of the children of the light_: verses 11-14 set forth _their influence upon the surrounding darkness_. Into these two divisions the exposition of this paragraph naturally falls.
I. "The fruit _of the light_" (not _of the Spirit_) is the true text of verse 9, as it stands in the older Greek copies, Versions, and Fathers. Calvin showed his judgement and independence in preferring this reading to that of the received Greek text. Similarly Bengel,[135] and most of the later critics. The sentence is parenthetical, and contains a singular and instructive figure. It is one of those sparks from the anvil, in which great writers not unfrequently give us their finest utterances,--sentences that get a peculiar point from the eagerness with which they are struck off in the heat and clash of thought, as the mind reaches forward to some thought lying beyond. The clause is an epitome, in five words, of Christian virtue, whose qualities, origin and method are all defined. It sums up exquisitely the moral teaching of the epistle. Galatians v. 22, 23 (_the fruit of the Spirit_) and Philippians iv. 8 (_Whatsoever things are true_, etc.) are parallel to this passage, as Pauline definitions, equally perfect, of the virtues of a Christian man. This has the advantage of the others in brevity and epigrammatic point.